Developed Cultures – Lesson Learned from South Korea

South Korea, a small country located between China and Japan, is one of the developed countries in the world with some of its brand, such as Samsung and LG, are nowadays leading the world in technology. With GDP per capita around 25,000 US dollars in 2007, it now becomes one of countries with the fastest development since 40 years ago. Compared to Indonesia, which at that time already had a luxurious Senayan football stadium and was able to hold ASIAN Games, South Korea at the same time was still a poor country with large number of people died because of hunger and cold.

Question arises here, how could this country change dramatically – from the country whose economic condition was worse than ours into one of the important developed countries in the world, from which Indonesia is far behind? Before answering that, I want to give some facts about this country. South Korea, just like Japan, has very little amount of natural resources. It even has to import 98% of its energy needs. The price of gasoline there is also quite expensive, around 2 US dollars a litre. These shows that its nature is not the one making it developed like now and thus, the reason behind this is no doubt, people.

South Korea is perhaps one of the countries whose citizens are the most hardworking people in the world. They work professionally as if they have to do it, otherwise they would die. It did happen in the past – around 60’s – when many people in South Korea died because they had no money to buy food or proper living equipments to protect them from cold during winter. “If I don’t work hard, I will die” is deeply held in its entire people.

The same thing goes to the students. The educational system in South Korea is the second best in the world and it is achieved by hardworking. Their slogan is also quite similar, “If I don’t study hard, I can’t get good work. If I don’t get good work, I will die.” Library in the university is the busiest building. In some universities, it is even opened 24 hours due to large demand from the students to study. They study there the whole time – especially when the exams week comes. When I was living in South Korea, I often went to downtown during weekend either to buy some stuffs or just hanging around. Downtown in South Korea, just like in big cities in Indonesia, is usually crowded with people during weekend. However, there was one time that when I went there, it was so quite. There were only few people walking there. When I asked my Korean friend about this, he told me that the following week was the National Examination week, so almost all the students were busy studying at home.

Education is one of the most important sectors in South Korea. The people give very high respect to teacher, lecturer, and other educational staffs. The average income of the professor in the university is about twice the GDP per capita or around 50,000 USD a year. This shows that South Korea has really good attention in this sector since this is the main sector related with human resources. It is totally opposite with the situation in Indonesia, in which the lecturer average income is not much different with Indonesian GDP per capita (3,700 USD) or about 4,000 – 5,000 USD a year.

Discipline is another characteristic of South Korean people. Do not dare to make promise with Koreans and then come late – I experienced this before. I made appointment to meet a Korean friend at 7 am in the morning. I came at 7.03 (three minutes late) and he was already gone – leaving me. If you have a class between 9 am to 12 pm, then be ready to sit in the whole time (exactly three hours). The lecturer will come on time and will not finish the class before time. If you buy train ticket and it says that the train will arrive in destination at 15.23, then it will arrive at that time.

What can we conclude from the explanations before? That becoming a developed country is not about how we can build hi-tech facilities in many sectors. Indeed, it is about how we take the developed value into our culture. It is still rare to find people with hardworking, willingness to study and educate, discipline, and other developed cultures in our country. Even if there is, the situation makes it looks weird. It is common to see a class filled with only few students at 8 am even though the class should be started at 8 am. It is common also to start meeting at 15.30 although it is supposed and mentioned before to start at 15.00. And it is not a taaboo thing to watch movies from the Internet during work time.

South Korea does not become a developed country in an instant. It is not a direct gift from God that nowadays their people in general can live more prosperous with more developed stuffs than us. It is because they wanted to be developed. Do not see how they now have good living. See how they achieve their good living instead. If we have all of the developed values mentioned before as our cultures, being a developed country is not a big matter.

Thus my question here is simple, do we want to be developed?